Love Linode, massive fan and advocate for many years but we're considering moving our VM's to Digitalocean.com. They've got great reviews, awesome control panel, SSD's for all plans, all for about 25% of the price. What makes Linode so much better that they are worth 4x the amount? The only obvious point I know of is that Digital ocean currently only have two physical locations - NYC and Amsterdam.

I'm not looking to put Linode down, they have been incredibly reliable and helpful, I'm just trying to make an informed decision.

imo just because they're sponsored by a vc doesn't mean they're legit.

in fact, I would be more worried than in 6 months or so they would get sold out to some other company

Depends on what you mean by 'legit'. I only provided the links to add some credibility and background. imho they are less likely to be 'fly-by-nighters' or deceptive/dishonest with a big name behind them but its certainly possible and I would be cautious myself.

No, that's not legit. Even OVH isn't selling unmetered gigabit connections anywhere remotely that cheaply, and OVH's entire purpose is to be disruptive to the market by leveraging their massive size to undercut the competition.

Looking at some actual benchmarks, their performance is pretty poor too. 8MB/s on SSDs? Yikes.

Selling unmetered gigabit connections for $5 per month means you won't be in business for long.

EDIT: This sort of offering is practically the definition of fly-by-night, because you're selling your product so far below cost.

Any knowledgeable VPS host would know that saying "Unlimited" is the sure mark of either scam or incompetence.

I dunno about that. I mean, we're talking about it.

I would consider switching if they prove to provide a consistent service. To be honest, we haven't seen much in the way of lowered prices or hardware upgrades around here in the last few years. Last RAM upgrade was summer 2010, and I wouldn't consider a 40% disk space increase over the last two years anything to jump up and shout about. It's starting to become noticeable on the RAM / disk front.

Linode might be a bit behind the curve in terms of passing on savings through dropping costs, but DigitalOcean is selling services at "scam warning bell" pricepoints. It's impossible to sell and deliver unmetered gigabit connections for $5 and not take huge losses. Either performance must be degraded (best-effort type scenario) or the price must be raised.

It's not clear what exactly they're promising. They say "All servers come with 1Gb/sec. network interface." Does that mean every cloud server, or every physical host? If it's every cloud server, how do they fit that many gigabit interfaces into a single physical host? If it's every physical host, then how do they make any kind of guarantee about performance?

They're selling these things as SSD-based. I've never seen SSD pricing, individually or in bulk, go much below $0.50 per gigabyte (and enterprise-grade is often much higher), so at $5/mth, it would take them two months just to cover the cost of storage, let alone the cost of bandwidth or the servers themselves...

Their benchmarks from what I've seen are already very low-end, and bandwidth performance is already rather lackluster. I'd much rather be on a platform like Linode that promises me a reliable amount of performance in a fixed quantity (like my 200GB of bandwidth) rather than a platform like DigitalOcean that says "free bandwidth" but doesn't really say if I'll get 1 megabit or 1000 megabits per second.